Tag Archives: carbon

CPP Investments, White papers

Hydrogen’s new moment | CPP Investments

A white paper on behalf of Thinking Ahead, a thought leadership platform at CPP Investments, a Canadian pension fund.

Challenge: Survey hydrogen’s enormous potential role in the energy transition across multiple sectors for an audience of non-energy experts.

Solution: A short white paper overviewing fast developing news in the hydrogen space, offset by classic data visualizations: call outs, tables and explainers for emphasis.

My roles: research, writing, data composition, chart design/recommendation, writing, copy editing, design/visual editing.

View the full report at CPP Investments or download here:

2021-03 Hydrogen’s new moment Download

GreenBiz

This carbon challenge is bigger than cars, aviation and shipping combined | GreenBiz

You may not know it, but you rely on industrial heat every day. It helped make the bricks that hold up your home; the cement underfoot. It forged the steel and glass in your car, and it also cooked the aluminum, plastic and silicon in the very screen on which you may be reading these words.

Industrial heat is essential but largely invisible. To transform basic inputs into stuff we need, manufacturers constantly heat (and cool) minerals, ores and other raw materials to extreme temperatures. And for all the magic of this everyday alchemy, industrial heat poses a growing threat to the climate. The world’s kilns, reactors, chillers and furnaces are powered mostly by fossil fuels.

High-temperature industrial heat, over 932 degrees F, poses a particular challenge because that’s the point at which fuels beyond electricity become the mainstay. Overall, industrial thermal energy accounts for about a tenth of global emissions, according to a December study by Innovation for Cool Earth Forum (ICEF, a Japan-backed multinational expert group). At 10 percent, industrial heat ranks on par with the combined emissions of cars (about 6 percent), planes (about 2 percent) and ships (about 2 percent).

Yet while those transport sectors are advancing towards low-carbon solutions — with promising technologies cultivated by multilateral accords — industrial heat lacks any consensus plan and has a long to-do list to develop low-carbon alternatives.

The options include biodiesel, renewable electricity, renewable natural gas, solar thermal, geothermal, thermal storage and hydrogen. Yet as a best guess, if these were market-ready today, renewable thermal solutions would cost from two times to over 10 times more than fossil fuels, according to an October report from the Center for Global Energy Policy (CGEP) at Columbia University.

Making natural gas renewable

In time, decarbonizing industrial heat is likely to require an all-of-the above mix of solutions. But for now, renewable natural gas (RNG) may offer a fix soonest. Chemically similar to the fossil gas piped to our kitchens, RNG is instead generated from the breakdown of organic matter at landfills (the biggest current source), municipal sewage treatment plants, farm waste and similar sites. RNG also can be blended into regular natural gas pipelines with minimal modification, much the way that input from windmills can flow onto the same grid as power generated by a coal plant.

In fact, the wind example can help illustrate how early efforts to decarbonize industrial thermal energy are shaping up. In the 2000s, when wind and solar weren’t yet cost-competitive, market players pioneered ways to sell renewable energy indirectly. The solution was a set of standards and trading rules known as renewable energy credits, or RECs. The credits let a business in, say, Pittsburgh buy wind power generated in California, even before renewables were yet available on Pennsylvania’s grid.

What’s more, RECs allow a wind farm to sell both the power it generated and the renewable attributes of that power. As consumer and corporate demand for renewables grew, the value of the RECs rose, thereby incenting new wind and solar projects. Over time, RECs let companies source the renewable energy they needed, even when it wasn’t available locally, which made it easier for companies and states to slowly boost their targets for renewables.

Certifying renewable thermal solutions

Fast forward to 2020, and a team of collaborators is hoping to adapt learnings pioneered with RECs to nurture a nascent market for zero-carbon fuels, such as RNG, that buyers including L’Oréal USA and the University of California System are already using to generate renewable thermal energy.

Today, RNG is held back in part by a Catch-22 financial trap. Costs add up quickly: equipment to collect biogas (the unprocessed methane-rich vapor given off by waste); upgrade the gas to pipeline quality; and connect to existing gas pipelines.

Capital needs for smaller landfill projects run from $5 million to $25 million. Larger projects — such as agriculture and wastewater plants — can hit $100 million, according to Jade Patterson, BloombergNEF’s analyst covering RNG. On average, each RNG project requires $17 million of capital investment, based on data from the RNG Coalition.

At that price, most farms or town dumps can’t afford to develop biogas collection on their own. “An effective certification program could give lenders the confidence to fund new installations,” Patterson said. And if farms see reliable demand for their RNG, more are likely to make the investment: supply grows; prices fall; and the Catch-22 can be broken.


“Companies are trying to decarbonize the heat piece of their Scope 1 carbon footprint,” explained Blaine Collison, an Environmental Protection Agency veteran and senior vice president at David Gardiner and Associates, a co-convener – along with the World Wildlife Fund and the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions – of the Washington, D.C.-based Renewable Thermal Collaborative. “Creating renewable thermal attributes and trading instruments is critical to enable companies to act, to show the actions they’re taking and to demonstrate the reductions they’re achieving.”

The effort to extend a REC model to renewable thermal energy is being co-led by the Center for Resource Solutions (CRS), a San Francisco based non-governmental organization that’s been advancing sustainable energy via policy and market-based innovations since 1997.

The first step? CRS is building a set of rules that meet the highest environmental standards and ensure that when customers buy green fuel, such as RNG, they can verify its lower carbon intensity, said Rachael Terada, CRS’ director of technical projects, in a recent webinar. 

Now in its first draft, CRS’ Green-e certified fuel certificate standard is focusing initially on RNG, already being produced and sold on a small scale across North America. The standard can be extended to other renewable fuels in time. (Watch out for more news in this space at CRS’ Renewable Energy Markets 2020, convening online Sept. 21-24.)

Covering the U.S. and Canada, CRS’s Green-e certification program will include rules for registries such that each dekatherm (equal to 1 million British thermal units) is unique and cannot be double-counted, Terada said.

There’s already demand from industry to buy more RNG, said Benjamin Gerber, chief executive of Minneapolis-based M-RETS (formerly Midwest Renewable Energy Tracking System), which is working to develop a registry to track RNG certificates. 

“Having clear standards for renewable thermal products along with robust trading platforms will help drive greenhouse gas reductions,” Collison said. “We know that there’s a growing corporate need for these solutions.”

Thermal energy, in the long run

CRS’ Green-e initiative has the potential to accelerate investment in renewable fuels, and thereby open up ways to decarbonize industrial energy markets.

Before then, companies can take some basic first steps, such as auditing their thermal energy use. “A lot of organizations simply haven’t done the work to understand how they’re heating and cooling their operations,” said Meredith Annex, who heads BloombergNEF’s heating decarbonization research team.

The urgency is growing. As industrialization accelerates in China, India and other emerging markets, global demand for industrial heat has grown by 50 percent since 2000, estimates BloombergNEF, and without lower carbon options, will continue to rise. 

Without a fix, global climate goals may not be achievable. “Decarbonizing industrial heat production will be essential to meeting the Paris Agreement goals,” notes David Sandalow, a former Obama administration official and lead author of ICEP’s roadmap to decarbonize industrial heat. 

Published 2020-08-13 https://www.greenbiz.com/article/carbon-challenge-bigger-cars-aviation-and-shipping-combined

Global CCS Institute

From fighting coal plants to fighting for carbon capture and re-use: Q&A with Laura Miller (Part II of II) | Global CCS Institute

Yesterday we heard the start of Laura’s story, and the progression of the Texas Clean Energy Project. This is the second and final part of the Q&A with Laura.

You have a competitor that’s following a similar technology path?

Yes, that’s Hydrogen Energy California (HECA). They’ve gone through a complete transformation. One of the original backers, BP, dropped out after the Gulf spill.

Like us, HECA also got Department of Energy (DOE) money as part of the Clean Coal Power Initiative. They got $408 million, we got $450 million. They’re also at 90 per cent capture. Their original design, I think, was using petcoke, rather than Wyoming coal.

When the project nearly died, in an effort to keep it alive, DOE went out and solicited other companies to come in and take it over. SCS Energy, in Concord, Massachusetts took over HECA in September.

I joked when I called the head of HECA because they have the same tax problem that we have right now in congress. I called the man who was negotiating to buy the project, the chairman of the company, and I said, “Hey, I hear that the project now is modelled after our project, that we have the same configuration,” and he said, “Yep. We like to tell everyone we meet that we taught you guys everything that we know.”

Is there sufficient demand for urea and CO2 to repeat this model in other facilities?

Right now, the United States imports about five million tons a year of urea and the US domestic production is 3.5 million. When we go online, we’ll be boosting urea domestic production by 20 per cent.

There’s obviously a finite amount of urea that can be produced worldwide, but the beauty of the syngas is that it makes lots of other products. You can make methane out of it, you can make ammonia out of it, you can make gasoline out of it. The Germans used coal gasification to fuel their entire war effort during World War II.

We picked urea because we did a very thorough look at the different markets for various products that could be made from a syngas and decided that urea was a profitable strong market because of this imbalance between domestic output and international production.

The plant has taken longer than you anticipated. What have been the delays?

We’ve had some shifts in the ownership of the project. Summit always builds for owners – so far, gas, solar and wind projects, never coal. We contract to do a turnkey power project, we build it, we hand over the keys, they give us a success fee, we move on to the next power project.

In this case, we developed the project and then Babcock & Brown became the owner of the project in 2008. But they had to give the project back to us because in the economic downturn, they went bankrupt and couldn’t afford to build it.

That was, obviously, a big setback and we kept the project going even though if we’d have been a gas plant, we just would have stopped working on it and moved onto the next project until we found a new owner and the economy improved.

But we have a strong philosophical belief that if coal’s going to be used in this country for power production in the future, it’s going to have to be done this way – in an incredibly clean way – and the time is now while the world is trying to find ways to reduce carbon emissions We decided it was worth holding onto the project because we thought we had a good business model and that if any of these projects was going to succeed, ours had a good chance to succeed.

Are you bearing the full development cost of the project now?

We added one key investor in the project, and it’s Clayton Williams out of West Texas. Had he not entered the project, we probably would not have been able to continue. He came in at a really critical time just before we got the DOE award, putting in money along with Summit.

Williams is a very colourful oil man in West Texas—a real character and a sweet man. He just turned 80, and he ran for governor against Ann Richards some years back.

Knowing oil, he immediately saw the value of the CO2. He understood how we put this together and how it could work and how it could be attractive to investors and so he became a minority owner.

Since then, we’ve talked to other investors, who will need to put up about $1 billion for financial closing. We have a checklist of things that these investors need to see in order to make their final decision and we’ve been, one by one by one, checking off all those milestones. Now we’re down to just a handful of things that need to be completed.

What’s done, and what remains to be completed?

Here are the milestones we’ve already passed.

We kicked off the front-end engineering and designing in June of 2010 and we finished it in July 2011. We got our air permit in December of 2010 with no opposition. That was a very big milestone for us.

We got our record of decision from the Department of Energy, which puts us in compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act. We have pre-sold all of the urea, CO2 and sulfuric acid. And we are about to sign our interconnection agreement that will connect our project to the state’s electricity grid.

What about the electricity?

Ah yes. Last but not least, we have sold all of the electricity to the city of San Antonio.

CPS Energy in San Antonio is the largest municipally-owned utility in the country, led by a CEO named Doyle Beneby. He’s been incredibly visionary in terms of where he wants the utility to go. He is shutting down one of his old coal plants early and buying all of our power, and building solar farms and wind projects.

Working with the mayor of San Antonio — who notably is the youngest mayor of a big city in the country, by the name of Julian Castro – they have joined up, so that every single power deal that they’re making is for green power, and includes an economic development component requiring companies they do business with to create jobs in San Antonio.

We, as an example, are opening an office in San Antonio for customer relations, and for media. And we’re forming a carbon management advisory board with environmentalists, industry experts and scientists on it, to be on the inside of our construction process so that they learn how the gasification process and carbon capture work. Then they can go out and tell people that clean coal with carbon capture does exist.

You’ve gone from fighting coal to selling a very complex coal project, and have been successful at both. How have you been able to sell others on the vision of this plant?

It can be difficult. It’s so funny. I was at a dinner party and someone asked me what I’m doing since I left being mayor, and I said, “Oh. I’m building a carbon capture power project that uses the carbon for enhanced oil recovery in the Permian Basin.”

The guy literally closed his eyes. And he said, “Oh. Wow. Huh.” and then he turned to a person on the other side of him to find more interesting conversation.

Whenever that happens, I always say, “But, I want you to know, I’m going to save the polar bears and make the planet safe for your grandchildren.” Sometimes that gets their attention.

The irony is that I’ve always been a communicator who used my communication skills to win journalism awards and get elected mayor of Dallas, but you start talking about gasification and compressed CO2 and everyone just goes to sleep on you.

It can be too abstract for the public to connect with. How do you get around that?

When I was fighting TXU’s big coal plant proposal, I kept losing in all these debates with them because they’d bring their engineers in to talk about how coal gasification didn’t work, and carbon capture didn’t work.

The most important thing I did at that time was to go to Tampa, Florida, where I had been told there was an advanced IGCC – gasification — plant operating. I had to fly there to go touch the plant, to be able to come back to Dallas, and stand up to them in the debates and say, “You are not being truthful. Gasification works, and it’s working in Tampa, Florida, and I saw it.”

They said, “Well, but that plant has a history of problems. And they use a very specific high-quality Appalachian coal. It’s the only kind of coal that can be used in gasification, and otherwise it just doesn’t work.”

So I said to them, “Really? Well, look at this,” and I opened my hand in the debate to show what looked like a shiny, black rock. I said, “Since you keep telling me this, the first question I asked the plant manager in Tampa is what kind of high-quality Appalachian coal do you use? He said, ‘We use pet coke from Houston”.

Then, I turned to the audience, and I said, “That’s basically sludge off refineries in our own backyard.”

So then the debates turned because then people said, “Oh my God, they haven’t been telling us the truth about what’s technologically available.”

My point is that offering real-world examples – when people can go and see and touch the cleanest coal plant in the world, which ours will be – it will really move the debate. Until then, it’s just conversation.”

Check out the original post here:
http://www.globalccsinstitute.com/community/blogs/authors/adamaston/2011/11/04/fighting-coal-plants-fighting-carbon-capture-and-re-use

Global CCS Institute

Is it fair for RAND to ask whether biomass co-firing can beat CCS on cost? | Global CCS Institute

I came across a tidbit in a recent RAND technical report, Near-Term Opportunities for Integrating Biomass into the U.S. Electricity Supply. While the focus of the bulk of the 187-page report, commissioned by the US Department of Energy, is biomass, RAND makes an intriguing, all-too-brief comparison with carbon capture and sequestration.

Its conclusion is that wood biomass, if sourced locally, is less costly than CCS – at least for the first 5 percent of  reduced fossil fuel input!. Here’s the nub of the report’s CCS assessment:

“Biomass cofiring is an alternative… [to CCS]. In CCS, the CO2 is captured from the flue gas and compressed for pipeline transport and permanent storage (NETL, 2010)…. [The] current estimated cost per ton abated for subcritical PC plants employing CCS, $94 per metric ton CO2e (NETL, 2010). We see that, for our three supply scenarios, our most likely cost of abating GHGs never rises above this estimate…. This result implies that, in a carbon-constrained world, cofiring would be an attractive option for reducing GHG emissions when compared with CCS at today’s costs. This result holds for the relatively expensive biomass–pellets transported over long distances, except at the high end of the cost estimates. Although the cost per ton of reducing GHG emissions is more attractive with cofiring than with CCS, the total number of tons of GHG emissions avoided is relatively small. Systems for CCS typically remove 80 to 90 percent of CO2 from flue-gas streams, reducing lifecycle GHG emissions by a similar percentage…. [C]ofiring subbituminous coal and wood chips at 10 percent results in GHG reductions of 8.7 percent because so much of the electricity is still generated by coal.”

For those interested in deeper details on cofiring, check out the 70-plus page report by clicking here. Regrettably, however, RAND makes no further mention of CCS, leading to more questions than answers.

  • Topping that list, as my colleague Christopher Short pointed out in our discussions of this report: why is CCS the bad guy here, posited as a high cost alternative? Any number of low-carbon technologies can make electricity, most of which are more expensive than co-firing a small amount of biomass with coal, but none of which address the compelling need to find a fix for greenhouse gas emissions from the installed base of fossil-fuelled power plants.
  • The findings are surprising given that some have claimed that biomass would lead to little—if any—net reductions of emissions over its lifecycle. If so, RAND’s exercise may ultimately be a moot point. In this camp is Resources For the Future’s Roger Sedjo, who has written that this conflict is in part due to varying time lines being assessed. In the long run, he argues, “biomass carbon is a zero sum game.” But for short periods and individual sites, he writes, the question is more complex.
  • The study’s conclusions are predicated on the coal substitute being “locally sourced wood biomass.” The study gives detailed cost comparison metrics about biomass costs and transportation’s factor. All the same, the cost question opens a Pandora’s box of follow on questions one of which is what about the majority of markets where supplies of woody biomass are scant or distant? That’s especially a concern for populated, built-up areas where power demand is typically greatest and biomass transport would be most costly.

Finally, however carbon-neutral or cost-effective it may, decarbonizing coal based energy systems through co-firing with biomass ultimately still requires the development of CCS to abate all the emissions. A less well known expectation is that to meet the stabilisation target of 450ppm of CO2-eq, CCS with biomass co-firing is a technology requirement for many of the energy-climate models used to explore mitigation pathways.